Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
I only know seven Bloodthirsty Butchers songs: one from the split 7″ with fellow Japanese band named after a horror movie Copass Grinderz, three from the double 7″ from with Rocket From The Crypt, and three more from the split EP with +/- (all pictured below). But damn, those songs are great and so is the quality of pairings. And what about the top-notch labels (K Records, Bacteria Sour, Teen Beat) and even artists (Tae Won Yu, Pushead, Yoshitomo Nara) they’ve worked with? With so much quality and so little quantity of information about the band from Sapporo, I was stoked to see the documentary about them directed by Jun Kawaguchi.
It turns out the Butchers’ story resembles that of many bands. They came from a small town and moved to the big city to grow their local success. After 20 years of playing medium paced and ultra melodic but gritty punk rock with everyman vocals, they are grouped with Husking Bee, Eastern Youth, and other heavyweights of Japanese punk yet struggle to survive. The members have to deal with singer Hideki Yoshimura’s controlling attitude and rude demeanor and will most likely never break through, but keep plowing on because the music is all that they have going for them at this point in their lives.
I’m writing the extended version of my two minute pecha-kucha presentation at the Little Tokyo Design Week. My job was to formulate a few images into something presentable with the topic of Future City. Earlier that day, I walked through a display featuring Apollo 11 moon landing imagery from the Expo ’70. Both events were monumental and it brought me to the realization that a Future City is based on dreams.
One can only imagine what it was like to live though the space race. Technology was just getting interesting. Room sized computers did nothing that we could comprehend. By placing a man on the moon, a new generation of imagination began. My mother and father watched the live broadcast of the moon walk like almost everyone else. Two weeks later, I was born.